Introduction

This data has been pulled from Seattle Open Data. I chose to observe the changes in checkout materials over the course of the last 5-6 years, the most popular publishers, the average checkouts each title has, and the publication year that has accumulated the most checkouts. For the checkout material trends, I was very curious to see how the numbers changed before, during, and after COVID. I was interested in learning which publishers are the most popular based on the checkouts because I realized I didn’t know many other publishers beside Penguin. The average checkouts and publication year with the most checkouts was something I didn’t have a hypothesis going into so I wanted to learn a bit more about this aspect.

Summary Information

The 5 values that I collected were : Average number of checkouts: 23.47 Month with the most checkouts: 6 Year with the most checkouts: 2020 Publisher with the most checkouts: Random House, Inc. Digital checkouts vs. physical checkouts in 2020: ~1.8 million vs. 500k

The Dataset

The data was collected and provided by the Seattle Public Library, and published by Seattle Open Data. The parameters of the data are number of checkouts, publishers, month, and year. The data was collected from the records of checkouts from the locations of the Seattle Public Library which were compiled together to create this dataset. The data was collected to bring more data to the public. Privacy could be a possible consideration in this data set, though the dataset does not include any personal data to trace it back to a person so it is completely anonymous. I didn’t run into many limitations while working with this data, though I did try to find the top five subjects and saw that most books had multiple subjects in the entry, which made finding the most popular a bit more difficult, so I ended up switching to finding the most popular publishers based on the number of checkouts as it was simpler. The publishers were not a list like the different entries in the subject column. Besides the issue with the subjects column, I didn’t really run into much else that affected my ability to successfully come up with values that made sense.

Your Choice

This bar chart shows the publishers of books that were checked out the most overall. The popularity of certain publishing companies is illustrated in the figure.